Not Having RSS For Your Blog And Just Relying On Tweeting

16 Aug 2016

I regularly come across organizations who have blogs without RSS feeds. Sometimes I will drop people a line and ask if they have one, or let them know it would be very useful to have an RSS feed easy to find. This is also a topic I write about regularly to help remind folks that RSS is not dead.

Almost every time I write about the topic I get a handful of people who tell me you don't need RSS anymore, you just tweet out your blog posts--nobody uses RSS readers after Google Reader went away. While it might be true that some folks have abandoned their feed readers, I think they were casual readers in the first place, and serious analysts still very much depend on RSS.

I wish I could help folks understand the power they are giving away to Twitter by thinking like this. I am happy to share a piece of my digital self with Twitter, but as with all platforms I use, I will be considering at every turn the benefit or damage to my own brand. RSS from your blog, at your domain, strengthens your brand and puts you in control of the syndication.

You can still use services like Zapier to take each new RSS entry and automatically Tweet out--you don't have to relinquish control of distribution to Twitter. This is the dangers of these platforms, every platform wants you to spend as much time generating content and media on their platform. This is how they make money, off your activity and hard work--please don't give it up for free, or at the cost of your own brand.

If you are a professional, and expect to make a living from your business, products, services, and brand--you need to maximize the control, licensing, and distribution of your content--give up only what you need. There is no reason to make a deal with Twitter that exclusively gives them full control over your syndication. RSS and API should always be your primary content distribution channel, and Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and others should follow after that.